This last episode of BSG was a huge story dump. It didn’t have the same action or tension as the last two episodes, but it answered a lot of questions about the origin of the final five and their role in the creation of the other cylons.
Something I found interesting was that Ellen says that she gave the skin jobs “free will”. This is loaded with all kinds of philosophical issues about the meaning of “free will” and whether it is possible for machines to have it (since machines are deterministic). If you like thinking about this question, I would highly recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Pinker has a chapter in which he describes a modern model of the brain. The image that cognitive scientists are putting together looks a lot like interdependent machines. Choice and free will fit into this framework through one center whose function is to adjust the relative weights of competing desires/interests (presumably the inputs to this machine include a person’s memory as well as his ability to predict the outcome of various choices). In essence, this is a mechanistic model which function a lot like “free will”.
So, maybe Ellen’s statement is sensible after all.
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